Listening, and listening

I don't think my Amherst College classmate (1960) Dave Wood would mind my repeating here a short Facebook exchange he and I had in response to my earlier post of Scott Russell Sanders's reflections on listening to trees. And speaking of the pleasures of one thing putting another in mind, I am reprinting below a moving and closely related poem by David Wagoner, who still spends a lot of time listening in his beloved Pacific Northwest.

DW

This puts me in mind of the sounds we hear at night at our remote lakeside camp in eastern Maine--historically, Wabanaki (Penobscot and Passamaquoddy) land. The loons--and there are many--are there as soon as the ice is off the lake in the spring, and stay (at least the young ones do) until late in the fall. They have an other-wordly and complex language, one that clearly has social significance for them. Each night, an hour or two after sunset, they begin calling from all over the lake, as if trying to locate each other as they settle for the night. This goes on for several minutes, then quiets down. Then (if the night is still) we can sometimes hear barred owls ("eight hooters"), and bullfrogs croaking from the marsh across the lake. During the day, the ravens are raucous--and their language, too, is complex. By mid-summer the mergansers that we see courting in May parade proudly up and down the lakeshore with a dozen ducklings in tow, the mothers clucking orders to their brood (the males seem to disappear after their job is done). It's a wondrous world.

JRB

Many thanks, Dave, for your stories of living with the birds of eastern Maine. I share your love of loons, who feel like lifelong companions - along with mourning doves - I listen for them wherever I am, wonder at their voices - most vividly on early morning and evening kayaking on Squam Lake in New Hampshire, where I lived for several years. Ravens, too, are special companions of a different sort - I'm influenced by Raven's large and problematic place in Indian legend, not unlike a winged Coyote. It is indeed a wondrous world. My gratitude for membership is unbounded.

Here is David Wagoner's poem:

The Silence of the Stars

 

When Laurens van der Post one night
In the Kalihari Desert told the Bushmen
He couldn't hear the stars
Singing, they didn't believe him.  They looked at him,
Half-smiling.  They examined his face
To see whether he was joking
Or deceiving them.  Then two of those small men
Who plant nothing, who have almost
Nothing to hunt, who live
On almost nothing, and with no one
But themselves, led him away
From the crackling thorn-scrub fire
And stood with him under the night sky
And listened.  One of them whispered,
Do you not hear them now?
And van der Post listened, not wanting
To disbelieve, but had to answer,
No.  They walked him slowly
Like a sick man to the small dim
Circle of firelight and told him
They were terribly sorry,
And he felt even sorrier
For himself and blamed his ancestors
For their strange loss of hearing,
Which was his loss now.  On some clear nights
When nearby houses have turned off their visions,
When the traffic dwindles, when through streets
Are between sirens and the jets overhead
Are between crossings, when the wind
Is hanging fire in the fir trees,
And the long-eared owl in the neighboring grove
Between calls is regarding his own darkness,
I look at the stars again as I first did
To school myself in the names of constellations
And remember my first sense of their terrible distance,
I can still hear what I thought
At the edge of silence where the inside jokes
Of my heartbeat, my arterial traffic,
The C above high C of my inner ear, myself
Tunelessly humming, but now I know what they are:
My fair share of the music of the spheres
And clusters of ripening stars,
Of the songs from the throats of the old gods
Still tending even tone-deaf creatures
Through their exiles in the desert.

 

~ David Wagoner ~